Three Transitions to Make for Running a High-Mature Digital IT

Though IT is permeating into every corner of the business, the majority of businesses still underestimate the IT potential, and only treat IT as a support desk, or even categorize it as a cost center. Can your companies rely on an IT system that is a commodity (standardized usage of technologies), or is the IT system the core of your business? Is your IT only a controller, or a business catalyst or even a game changer.  The approach depends on the company business and the role that IT plays in defining its positioning in the market. Here are three transitions to make for running a high mature IT.
The transition from a maintenance mindset to a value creation mindset: Many CIOs graduate from IT management where their job was to maintain. The transition from a maintenance mindset to a value creation mindset is a stretch for some. In order to improve IT maturity, CIOs should have know-how attitude about businesses, they are able to demonstrate the full reasoning behind the proposal, in order to shift to proactive mode smoothly. If CIOs are not able to make any dent within executive board, then IT is just acting in the reactive mode. Their proactive solutions will not get enough traction in most cases. Such “fixing symptom” mentality is still complacent, short-sighted and too “ordinary.” Hence, such transition needs a strong team with the culture innovation. If CIOs are only taking the orders and extremely risk averse, at the end of the day, they can frustrate their internal staff and business process owners by not delivering much in value-based solutions.
The transition from internal IT management to the management of IT at the organizational level:  It is not a function that can be handled only inside the IT department or by IT managers. They do not have all the information needed, they do not have all mechanism & authority to collect that information and they do not have all the skills necessary to evaluate the information. IT is business, IT failure is caused by the management of IT rather than just IT management. The responsibility for evaluating the performance of IT investment lies squarely with the C-Level/board leadership team. Without effective guidance/support from the board, the managers in the IT department are perhaps working in the dark. One of the fundamental problems facing CIOs when dealing with their CXO counterparts is where their priorities lie. Therefore, to become a trusted advisor, it is important that the CIO can be seen to "stand aside" from the operational issues and look at things from the top management perspective.
CIOs need to transit from inside-out operation-driven to outside in customer-centric: A high mature digital IT needs to strategically work with their variety of clients: They could be other C-level executives, business line managers, general IT users or external customers, etc., to provide business solutions instead of products. This includes being business savvy, client service oriented and reputable as trusted advisers. IT should not only meet the needs of internal users but also spend more resource and work closely with business partners to digitize the touch point of end customer experience. This also means the CIO needs to carefully listen and has to sell or resell the management on allocating funds for the business solutions. And IT value needs to be measured via bringing solutions to the clients’ highest priority business problems. IT is impacting every business unit and is becoming the driver of business change. There are many transitions on the way, it has to keep digital flow from top-down to bottom up; from branding on the surface to tuning the processes underneath; from data-driven decisions style to customer-centric mentality, It is the shift from “Doing more with Less,” to “Doing more with Innovation,” and from doing digital to being digital.
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